Introduction and Traditional Software Development 1. What is software? Answer: Computer programs and associated documentation.

Software products may be developed for a particular customer or may be developed for a general market. 2. What are the attributes of good software? Answer: Good software should deliver the required functionality and performance to the user and should be maintainable, dependable and usable. 3. What is Software Engineering? Answer: Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation and maintenance of software. It is the application of engineering methods to software development. 4. Write two main characteristics that differentiate software from other physical products. Answer: The two main characteristics that differentiate software from other physical products are: i. ii. The costs of oftware development are concentrated in engineering and not in production. Also, the cost of software is not dependent on volume of production. Software does not wear out and it does not require any spare parts.

5. What are different generations of computers? Answer: The development of computer technology has taken place in distinct stages. The first generation of computers was built on vacuum tubes. The second-generation machines were built by using transistors. The third generation made use of Integrated Circuits (ICs). The present day's fourth-generation computers use Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits. 6. How has the development of DBMS helped the software industry? Answer: Development of DBMS software helped in use of computers for data storage. This permitted the development of more sophisticated software for business applications. 7. What is software crisis? Answer: In the early days of software industry, programmers followed their own personal style for writing programs. The design was implicitly performed in one's mind, and documentation was often non-existent. Due to developments in the field of information

technology, computer programs also became very large and complex. With no tools or methods for managing this increased complexity, a large proportion of software projects failed during 1970s. It was referred to as 'software crisis.' 8. What is 'principle of abstraction' in relation to software engineering? Answer: The principle of abstraction implies that a problem can be simplified by omitting irrelevant details. Once simpler, the problem is solved and then the omitted details can be taken into consideration in stages. 9. What is 'principle of decomposition' in relation to software engineering? Answer: Decomposition is a technique to solve a complex problem by dividing it into several smaller problems. The problem is decomposed in such a way that each component can be solved independently and then the solution of the different components can be combined to get the full solution. 10. What are the four core aspects of software development? Answer: Product, Process, People and Project are four important core aspects of software development. Software development involves both technical and managerial aspects. 11. What do you mean by software process? Answer: The term software process refers to the methods of developing software. It generally involves a number of steps or operations. 12. What are different types of software processes? Answer: There are four major types of software processes. These are: (1) Software Development Process, (2) Software Project Management Process, (3) Software Configuration Management Process and (4) Software Process Management. 13. What are the different phases of a classical waterfall model? Answer: Different phases of a classical waterfall model are: (1) System Engineering, (2) Requirement Analysis, (3) Design, (4) Implementation or Coding, (5) Verification or testing, (6) Maintenance 14. What is a software prototype? Answer: A prototype is a working representation of the system. By seeing and interacting with the prototype model, the users are better able to realize what the real system will be like. The prototype is refined till the users are reasonably satisfied. From this the software developers are able to develop software that fulfils the real needs of users.

15. Which is the model suitable for development of technically challenging software products? Answer: Risk handling is inherently built into the spiral model. The spiral model is suitable for development of technically challenging software products because these are prone to several kinds of risks. 16. Name some process standards applicable to software industry. Answer: The ISO/IEC 12207 standard, Capability Maturity Model (CMM), ISO 9000 standards, and SPICE (Software Process Improvement Capability Determination) are some popular process standards applicable to the software industry. 17. What is Requirement Engineering? Answer: Requirement Engineering is a systematic approach for determining software requirement specifications. 18. Name six types of software requirement specifications as per IEEE standard. Answer: The six types of software requirement specifications are: (1) Design requirement, (2) Functional requirement, (3) Implementation requirement, (4) Interface requirement, (5) Performance requirement and (6) Physical requirement. 19. What are the important activities of the requirements engineering process? Answer: Inception, Elicitation, Elaboration, Negotiation, Specification, Validation and Management are the important activities of the requirements engineering process. 20. Who are the stakeholders of a typical software system? Answer: A stakeholder can be defined as 'anyone who benefits in a direct or indirect way from the software system being developed.' The usual stakeholders are management, marketing people, consultants, system analysts, software engineers and support/maintenance engineers of the software firm, and also buyers and end-users of the software. 21. Name some standard techniques used for elicitation of users' requirements. Answer: Requirement Elicitation through Interview, Questionnaire, Record Review, Direct Observation and Collaborative Requirement Gathering are some standard techniques used for elicitation of users' requirements. 22. What is SRS?

Answer: SRS stands for Software Requirement Specification. It describes the functions and performance requirements of software. It also lists the constraints that will affect software development. It serves as the basis for subsequent software engineering activities. 23. List the important characteristics of a structured program. Answer: A structured program avoids unstructured control flows by restricting the use of GOTO statements. It mainly uses three types of program constructs, i.e. Selection, Sequence and Iteration. A) A structured program consists of a well-partitioned set of modules. It uses single entry, single-exit program constructs such as if-then-else, do-while etc. Thus, the structured programming principle emphasizes designing control structures in an orderly manner. 24. Name the three essential models of 'Structured System Analysis and Design (SSAD)'. Answer: Environmental Model, Behavioral Model and Implementation Model are three essential models of SSAD. 25. Differentiate between Static and Dynamic Modeling. Answer: In OOAD, the objects and their relationships are designed by using some model and are expressed as some data-type in a programming language. This is the static or structural aspects of design and is called 'Static Modeling'. B) The objects interact with each other and also perform some action. This dynamic aspect of object is called object behavior. The behavior of objects is defined through methods. This is called 'Dynamic Modeling'.